….A Closed and Common Orbit picks up right after the final events of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, with the once-Lovelace Artificial Intelligence, now reset and memory-less, finding a new life aboard a new body. Before, Lovelace had eyes everywhere and her task was to care for the health and wellbeing of the Wayfarer’s crew. Now, renamed Sidra, she finds herself in a new–and illegal–synthetic body, trying to cope with a limited, isolated, and physical existence that simply doesn’t seem enough.

There is a joke in the Lord of the Rings films that is not present in the books–while hanging around at The Prancing Pony, Merry comes back to the table with a great big tankard. and Pippin asks what he’s drinking:

“This, my friend, is a pint,” he says wickedly.

Pippin’s eyes widen. “It comes in pints?”

It makes sense that hobbits would veer toward smaller pours because they are smaller people–you wouldn’t give a five-year-old a pint glass of juice because they have smaller stomachs and the glass would be harder to manage in smaller hands. But even if the average hobbit goes from half-pint to half-pint, that doesn’t mean that their rates of consumption are low in the alcohol department.

(4) ALLUSION OR UNCITED SOURCE? At Electric Literature, Carmen Maria Machado, in “How to Suppress Women’s Criticism”, argues that Neil Gaiman’s jacket blurb for Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life essentially did a disservice to Joanna Russ.

It was only then that I saw the lead blurb at the top of the dust jacket. Written by Neil Gaiman, it reads in part:

“Not just a terrific biography, but a remarkable act of reclamation: if there was ever a great writer of the twentieth century who fell victim to ‘How to Dismiss Women’s Fiction,’ it was Shirley Jackson.”

…That might seem like a lot of pressure to put on a blurb, especially because blurbs are an unavoidable part of a professional writer’s life. But Russ is dead. Jackson is dead. And in the thoughtless, uncredited, mangled deployment of that phrase —even in praise— Gaiman broke the chain between the two of them; a prominent, living male artist inserted between Russ’ ideas and Jackson’s reality. It would have been such a little, correct thing to keep that link alive — a gesture whose implications would have far outweighed its size. And yet, like so many tiny, seemingly insignificant cultural gestures — whose collective weight can buoy, or suffocate — it is a symptom of a larger condition.

(5) LOST LIGHT. James Davis Nicoll sent this link with the note, “Female blogger silenced.” After six years in the fight, wundergeek’s (Anna Kreider) game industry blog Go Make Me a Sandwich (how not to sell games to women) is signing off.

While it is undeniable that my blog has resulted in positive change in some parts of the games industry and community, that change has come at tremendous personal cost. First and foremost, it’s cost me my reputation; because of this blog, I will always be “controversial”. Go Make Me a Sandwich started as a personal project, something that I started as a hobby because I wanted to write about something that was a growing area of interest for me. By the time it took off, the damage was done; my Google Rank has inextricably tied my name to feminism forever, and that can be dangerous. It’s certainly translated into a level of difficulty in my meatspace life that I never anticipated before starting this blog.

Writing this blog has also taken a tremendous toll on my mental health. The backlash that I’ve faced because of what I do here has been terrifying…..

There are also those who know about the abuse and choose to believe that the abusers aren’t the problem. The real problem is me: my feelings about my experiences of marginalization and harassment and how I express them. There are many in our community who think that it’s a bigger problem that I’m not nice about my feelings toward my abusers than it is that I’m being abused. So instead of holding the abusers accountable for their abuse, which is known and well-documented, they instead decide to publicly castigate me for committing the womanly sin of having feelings about a thing incorrectly…..

…. MY WHOLE GODDAMN LIFE I’ve been told that I was “too much”. Too loud. Too opinionated. Too brash. Too arrogant. Too abrasive. Too bossy. My whole life, people have been trying to shove me into a box that I just don’t fit in, no matter how hard I try – the box of proper womanhood. This blog was my place where I could be ME. Unapologetically. Loudly. Defiantly! And walking away from that feels like walking away from part of myself.

It feels like climbing into the box voluntarily.

It feels like capitulation. Like surrender.

I’m sorry I couldn’t be stronger.

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY

October 19, 1953 — Fahrenheit 451 published.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

Born October 19, 1945 – John Lithgow, of Buckaroo Banzai and Third Rock from the Sun.

That shine is missing in “Zombie Prom,” another campy 1990s off-Broadway musical getting its area premiere. Boy meet girl, boy loses girl, boy despairs and jumps into a vat of nuclear waste. He returns as a zombie — but can he still go the prom?

This is strictly for hardcore musical devotees who want to see what Dana P. Rowe and John Dempsey wrote before their musicals “The Fix” and “The Witches of Eastwick.” The Unexpected Stage Company, last seen showcasing Deb Margolin in “8 Stops,” isn’t giving buffs a particularly good look. Virtually the only number inspiring a grin is the 1950s-style girl-group ballad “Jonny Don’t Go” (“ . . . to the nuclear plant” is the rest of the plea), sung with nice comic understatement by Julia Klavans as the doomed Jonny’s girlfriend, Toffee. The rock-and-roll quartet tucked up onto a platform in a back corner of the stage tries to capture the feel of the 1950s sock-hop score but can’t quite swing it. Neither can much of the rest of the indifferently designed, unevenly performed show.

(9) REFILL. John King Tarpinian found an even better image of the Logan’s Rum reference on The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror episode.

(10) RURITANIA MISUNDERSTOOD. Since Ian Sales reads this blog, wouldn’t it be more efficient for him to engage the commenters here and clarify the misunderstanding?

judging by comments on File770 I appear to have invented a new critical term for sf that doesn't map onto my use of the term

Your work is typically labeled “speculative fiction” or “science fiction” or “fantasy,” in spite of your protests. How do you think the typical demarcations of “mainstream,” “literary,” and “speculative” fiction have evolved since you began writing?

I’ve never protested when my science fiction and fantasy is called science fiction and fantasy—why should I, when that’s what it is? But a lot of it isn’t, and I do protest having all my work lumped into a genre that only some of it belongs to. I’ve written for decades in various genres including realism, SF, fantasy, kiddilit, and fable. I published poetry long before I sold a story, and am still publishing it. I’m no longer writing fiction. I don’t fit into any pigeonhole. I’m all kinds of birds. The walls between fictional genres that were constructed by critical prejudice and ignorance are going down fast, and I love to watch them go! [That being said], genre is a permanently useful idea when used rightly, to indicate actual difference in subject-matter, style, expectation. It’s sort of like dogs, isn’t it? Your basic dog is a mongrel. No one breed is “superior” to all others, and exclusive inbreeding results in monsters. But variety and adaptability are valuable traits in a species, and there are real differences between breeds. Long live the Chihuahua, the Elkhound, the Poodle, and the Mutt.

Anyway, this is my method: if I am asked — as I was recently — to write something set in say the time of the revolution, the first thing I do is buy one or two general interest books, preferably ones well thought of. Then I buy a biography or ten written by people of the time. And then I outline the book and decide what targeted research I’ll need. Will they sit down at table? Will there be a tavern scene? All of those have books written about them. I find those and read them for the specific scenes I need. At this time, too, to “soak in” the feel of things I start watching documentaries about that time and place. This gives a “texture” to the book it would otherwise lack.

Of course, my books change as I write them, so sometimes I’ll find I have to write a scene that wasn’t in the outline, like horse shoeing or perhaps riding between two specific scenes. At that time, I will put notes all over the book that say “look up x” — most people use something to bracket those, that isn’t used in normal writing, so that we can do a final look see and make sure we got them all. I use curly brackets — and also, my monitor gets “porcupined” with sticky notes with things like “try to find book or website or reenactor who knows about x.” and “I’m almost sure the description of horse shoeing in the blah blah novel is wrong,” but it’s all I could find “so, replace it when you figure out the right one.” …

(13) NUMBER ONE. Castalia House again has topped an Amazon sales category with its latest release – a book that apparently was acquired at a bargain price:

Mike Cernovich’s new book, MAGA MINDSET: Making YOU and America Great Again, is the #1 bestseller in Amazon’s Politics & Social Sciences>Leadership category. That’s not surprising, as his prevous book, Gorilla Mindset, self-published in 2015, was also a bestseller

What is surprising, however, is that languishing behind the Donald Trump-supporting author’s latest bestseller is Stronger Together, a book published only last month, written by Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine. The Clinton-Kaine book, signed by Simon & Schuster to $14 million advance, currently sits at 5th place in the category…..

The new Cernovich bestseller, signed to an advance that was, according to Day, “pretty close to $14 million less than Clinton and Kaine got,”….

96 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/19/16 The Pixel With The Ticks Will Be The Scroll That Is Droll”

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“When will bystanders, especially men, learn how and actively stand up and say stop and let those being harassed know they have support?”
People are not responsible for what others say. If you say something as a [insert whatever demographic category you choose] others of that [demographic category] are not responsible. Individually, we are all responsible for our own actions. Collective guilt is very Old Testament.

Noteworthy that you see a request for support as an accusation of guilt. Regardless, 2 things:

@4–“allusion”. I got what he was saying without having to have it spelled out for me. That’s probably what happened with the blurb–he wrote it as if writing to someone who ‘got’ the reference.
She could have just said “I’d prefer he used Russ’ name for this reason” but then I guess it would have been a shorter article.

I finished Acceptance last night and oh did it ever finish on a melancholy note. I liked it a lot and enjoyed the multiple perspective characters. I liked the fact that we weren’t spoon-fed answers and what we got were mostly from unreliable sources. V’z fb tynq jr qvqa’g trg Nhagvr Wnpxvr’f (be Hapn Ybjel’f) Rkcbfvgvba Gvzr.

I don’t see that Sales needs to be read as referring to big sciencey stuff. What he is saying is that for something to be properly SFnal there has to be some plot-significant reason for it to be set in a world other than our own. He doesn’t set limits to what that reason might be. C.S. Lewis, after dismissing the ‘displaced persons’, lists four reasons why someone might want to write in a science-fictional setting – roughly, an interest in engineering, an interest in discovery, an interest in the destiny of humanity, and an interest in the fantastic (which itself takes many forms). No doubt there are others. The point about Ruritanian SF is that it could be set in the world as we have it without any loss.

I’d agree he is going a bit far when he says ‘it is unadventurous and unlikely to provoke critical discussion’. If, say, Jane Austen had decided to set Pride and Prejudice on Mars, it would still be a deep and fascinating work, but we might wonder why she chose to write it as science fiction.

Andrew M: I’d agree he is going a bit far when he says ‘it is unadventurous and unlikely to provoke critical discussion’. If, say, Jane Austen had decided to set Pride and Prejudice on Mars, it would still be a deep and fascinating work, but we might wonder why she chose to write it as science fiction.

And that’s what I took issue with: his wholesale dismissal of all “Ruritanian SF” as nothing more that mindless entertainment, simply because the science-fictional elements are not the primary purpose of it.

There has been a great deal of thought-provoking, innovative science fiction which could be classified as “Ruritanian SF”. His casual throwing-out of the baby with the bathwater seems incredibly snooty and short-sighted to me.

But based on the “Hugos are worthless” rant he posted last year and this one, it does seem to be one of his habits.

JJ: I’m not being hoity-toity, and I don’t really appreciate that you jumped to that conclusion. The architecture of Tumblr is not designed to facilitate conversation the way it was (well, is) on LJ. Tumblr has a different function, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t support the kind of stuff I want to do very well. Just like Twitter’s not ideal for the person who preferred the old days when blogs prevailed (I happen to love Twitter, but again, it’s good for some things and not others).

I finally understand now why some of my File 770 notification emails get tagged “Live Journal.” It’s because someone has mentioned those words somewhere in the quoted comments. I still have a minimal presence there. I recently wrestled with it to acknowledge my existence so I could delete a spam comment. Tempting.

In my experience different social media work better for different people. For some of us this is cool something for everyone for others it’s ugh my way is the best and only true way.

I find different media works for me better at different times depending on my mood, energy, health, and what device I’m accessing it from. Sometimes I’m all about blogging. Other times FB is great. Still other times I love Twitter. Occasionally I like Pinterest and Instagram. LJ was never among my favs but I was never a journaler. I loved yahoo and email groups for years until getting 1000+ emails a day overwhelmed me. I’m sure I’m forgetting a number of other social media I use or have used since the 1980s.

One thing I’ve learned is I had to adjust to change and be willing to go where my friends are or I’d be left behind and possibly forgotten. I know I’ve forgotten friends who didn’t keep up and in touch as no way I can stay up with 20+ profiles much as I tried to for 20+ years. Some days it blows my mind I’ve got online friends younger than I’ve been online. /get off my lawn

LJ retains a significant Russian userbase, including especially a number of political dissident bloggers. I look at every active English-language account there as another little bit of protection against the Russian government finding a pretext to swoop in and shut it down sometime.

Seriously. Who really cares if a foreign government takes down some site that no one outside the country uses? Whereas if Russia destroys the online presence of George R. R. Martin, that’s going to draw some serious international attention.

Every now and then he writes an interesting blog post, so I go and look at his website when it occurs to me. He offers some substantial thoughts — and when they have nothing to do with puppies, I’m even happier to link to them.

I’m always a bit bewildered by laments about the death of Live Journal. It’s still there. Lots of people still have accounts and post and read. Even after moving my blog to my own website, I continue to mirror it on LJ because of the number of people who would be disappointed if they couldn’t read it there. (Well, ok, it’s a pitifully small number of people, but I treasure every reader I have.) And if people are twitchy about the whole Russian ownership thing, there’s Dreamwidth which was set up to be LJ for people who wanted to leave LJ.

What isn’t there any more is the exact same community dynamic that was present during a particular Golden Age of LJ. But community dynamics, by their very nature, are transient and mutable. No online community has ever survived the consequences of its own success. People aren’t longing for Live Journal, they’re nostalgic for a Lost Golden Age that — if we were honest — was busily sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

But if people want to Make Live Journal Great Again, all they have to do is revive their accounts and start posting, reading, and commenting.

@Heather Rose Jones:
A friend of mine used to refer to the ‘social black hole effect’… social spaces that pass a certain level of popularity become self-sustaining because people who show up randomly will stay around to chat if there are others there to talk to. Drop below a certain point and things will fall apart on their own because there’s nothing to hold it together anymore.

And, of course, one of the unfortunate side effects of that is that some of the new people who show up might be ones who will drive others off…

Whether it’s free or deftly manages to climb to the apex of a molehill of a sub-sub-category during the hour you’re looking at it on Amazon or both, the validity of bestseller status appears to be based on the validation such status provides as long as no one looks at the context.

I say this as the #1 lemonade salesman of all time*

*on my block, on a specific day, between the hours of 9am-1pm, in the lemonade with ice category

Sales is still over on Twitter whingeing about File770 and embracing the role of “crabby old man yells at clouds” — utterly oblivious to the fact that it’s not File770 that is the source of his issues. 🙄

Could be the wrong thread, but it occurred to me earlier today that the Rocky Horror Picture Show was another ‘murder at the convention’ story, though perhaps not a mystery. Anyway, we just passed that scene in the Fox TV version, and so far the worst thing I can think of to say about it is that their Furter is no Tim Curry… and really, who is?

Brad and Columbia are a tiny tad underpowered as well, while I’m being critical, but overall, it’s like watching a gifted college drama department (thinking of Christopher Newport University now, with great fondness) reinventing a classic. They’re not mimicking the celluloid ghosts, and that’s good. I just wish Furter would make more of her lines.

The show is presented with minimal audience participation nods, and that’s kind of a two-way relief. I’m glad they don’t have them all through, but I also appreciate that they tipped their hat to the audiences who made the show what it was. (Gordon Garb got me a recording of the entire audio track of the show, and the silences after, “Hi! I’m Brad Majors!” were somewhat disconcerting at times.)

I for one am immensely saddened by the passing of “Go Make Me A Sandwich”. Amy Kreider was an inspiration to us all. She truly was the wind beneath my wings as a role-playing game designer. Without her presence on the web and dedication to spreading her philosophy far and wide, I never would have gotten off my futon and finished my own little indie RPG. I am so grateful to Anna Kreeber that I even dedicated my first role-playing game to her. It’s right there on the title page to “Shitlord: The Triggering”.

I for one am immensely saddened by the passing of “Go Make Me A Sandwich”. Amy Kreider was an inspiration to us all. She truly was the wind beneath my wings as a role-playing game designer. Without her presence on the web and dedication to spreading her philosophy far and wide, I never would have gotten off my futon and finished my own little indie RPG. I am so grateful to Anna Kreeber that I even dedicated my first role-playing game to her. It’s right there on the title page to “Shitlord: The Triggering”.

I have read “Ruritanian SF” (well, “Fantasy” actually) that conformed to Sales-san “ideal” of not having any good reason not to be set in the “real” world. And I did not actually like it that much.

OTOH, the claim that this applies to most SF being published today? Bizarre. Certainly plausible that most SF is just window-dressing of SF tropes (was it ever different?) but this is now “Ruritanian” and a new bad thing? Daft.

“Ruritanian” does not mean “no plot reason for something”. Words have meaning? I hope.

And some “Ruritanian SF” make good use of not being set in “real” world.

Now I like a good overstatement as much as the next girl, but it seems to me that Sales-san has gone way overboard on this one.

And blaming LJ/File770 on being called on overstatement? What a load of bollocks.

@Cassy B: I was shooting for ‘clever asshole’, so that means I’m batting .500. Put me in the hall of fame, yo!

It’s called tough love, and as hard as it may be for you to believe, I’m genuinely trying to help Anna. She admits that she is a troubled soul with much stress and anxiety, and I’m showing her the way to a healthier and more pleasant lifestyle. The water is right there, but that horse just won’t drink. Shame really.

But not just Anna. More people should consider embracing their inner Pepe – it would unlock and release a lot of pain for them and usher their lives into a new and glorious golden age of low stress, zen like fun.

We are drowning in [violence and abuse and disrespect towards women]. And all of us are doing what women have always done. We’re trying to keep our heads above water. Just trying to get through it. Trying to pretend like this doesn’t really bother us.

Maybe because we think that admitting how much it hurts makes us, as women, look weak. Maybe we’re afraid to be that vulnerable. Maybe we’ve grown accustomed to swallowing these emotions and staying quiet, because we’ve seen that people often won’t take our word over his. Or maybe we don’t want to believe that there’s still people out there who think so little of us as women.

–Michelle Obama

@clif: Thanks for linking that video of men reading the misogynistic messages to the women sports reporters. It was really powerful.

I remember reading Anita Sarkeesian’s post “One Week of Harassment on Twitter” and feeling sick. Content warning for misogyny, gendered insults, victim blaming, incitement to suicide, sexual violence, rape and death threats. You know, as one gets. (At least as one gets for womaning on the internet about vidya.)

Jokes of the form, “For those of you less tech-savvy,” followed by something entirely untrue which less tech-savvy can be hilariously counted upon to take at face value, are rarely as funny as some people think.

In case it still needs clearing up, it’s the line I just added to my Stylish (plug-in) stylesheet for File770 that adds the latest troll to the list of those to whose posts will appear more or less grayed out. Sorry; in my previous post I opted for pithy rather than informative.

If someone has the link to the original stylesheet, in case anyone not in the know would like to implement it, that would be keen. I seem to have lost it.

I don’t do DDos attacks. That is a sentence I never thought I’d have to type.

N.B. to anyone who was curious about Imzy, just an FYI that membership has opened. I had a look and it strikes me as kind of a merger of Tumblr and Reddit. Which means it’s so not for me, but it may be for others if they wanna check it out.